# A Gift from Label Smoothing: Robust Training with Adaptive Label Smoothing via Auxiliary Classifier under Label Noise

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06548/) (2017)
- [Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09482/) (2017)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Regularisation of Neural Networks by Enforcing Lipschitz Continuity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04368/) (2018)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [Normalized Loss Functions for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13554/) (2020)
- [Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02613/) (2017)
- [Probabilistic End-to-end Noise Correction for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07788/) (2019)
- [Does label smoothing mitigate label noise?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02819/) (2020)
- [CleanNet: Transfer Learning for Scalable Image Classifier Training with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07131/) (2017)
- [SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01842/) (2019)
- [Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise: A Sample Sieve Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02347/) (2020)
- [Comparing Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Mean Squared Error Loss in Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08919/) (2021)
- [Robust Large Margin Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08254/) (2016)
- [Towards better decoding and language model integration in sequence to sequence models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02695/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Noisy Label Processing for Classification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04159/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Real-World Medical Image Classification with Noisy Labels: Challenges, Practice, and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09315/) (2025)
- [Variational Learning Induces Adaptive Label Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07273/) (2025)
- [Noise-aware few-shot learning through bi-directional multi-view prompt alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11617/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As deep neural networks can easily overfit noisy labels, robust training in the presence of noisy labels is becoming an important challenge in modern deep learning. While existing methods address this problem in various directions, they still produce unpredictable sub-optimal results since they rely on the posterior information estimated by the feature extractor corrupted by noisy labels. Lipschitz regularization successfully alleviates this problem by training a robust feature extractor, but it requires longer training time and expensive computations. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective method, called ALASCA, which efficiently provides a robust feature extractor under label noise. ALASCA integrates two key ingredients: (1) adaptive label smoothing based on our theoretical analysis that label smoothing implicitly induces Lipschitz regularization, and (2) auxiliary classifiers that enable practical application of intermediate Lipschitz regularization with negligible computations. We conduct wide-ranging experiments for ALASCA and combine our proposed method with previous noise-robust methods on several synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results show that our framework consistently improves the robustness of feature extractors and the performance of existing baselines with efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/jongwooko/ALASCA.
